something to do with the billions in US aid and opening their markets up to the west and installing democracy that encouraged innovation etc?

Todays oily arabs seem to have a few bucks to throw around. Do they use it to further research on the mysteries of life? No, they use it to "sponsor" Instagram models and make them eat poo. Google: dubai porta potty.

Incorrect. The wiki article provides two additional sources for the claim.

Did you look at them? They're hardly authoritative:

Quote:

Vernet 1996, p. 788: "IBN AL-HAYXHAM, B. AL-HAYTHAM AL-BASRI, AL-MisRl, was identified towards the end of the 19th century with the ALHAZEN, AVENNATHAN and AVENETAN of mediaeval Latin texts. He is one of the principal Arab mathematicians and, without any doubt, the best physicist."Hess 1995, p. 66: "It is known that Galileo had a copy of "Opticae Thesaurus" of Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), an Arab scholar who is praised today for his experimental method, although views on what this method entails and which importance it has in Ibn al-Haytham's work differ. (Omar 1979:68)."

And here's why you can't trust wiki. On another article about his work, he's referred to as a Persian scholar:

Quote:

The Book of Optics (Arabic: Kitāb al-Manāẓir‎ (كتاب المناظر); Latin: De Aspectibus or Perspectiva; Italian: Deli Aspecti) is a seven-volume treatise on optics and other fields of study composed by the medieval Persian scholar Ibn al-Haytham, known in the West as Alhazen (965– c. 1040 AD).

He can be Arab. I done told ya I expected an outlier or two, and the point is surely proven by now. You scrape and you twist and you argue about this one, whereas I can just rattle off a few more persians. Presumably those people you mentioned who attribute much to Syrian christains and jews could rattle of several names too.

Come on Honk, you dug up 2 sources, one from that most famous world-renowned sites 'http://web.olivet.edu/', and the other says he was either an arab or a persian. Against, among others, Encyclopedia Britannica.

Come on Honk, you dug up 2 sources, one from that most famous world-renowned sites 'http://web.olivet.edu/', and the other says he was either an arab or a persian. Against, among others, Encyclopedia Britannica.

And you speak of authority on the matter?

No, Honk’s just saying he couldn’t possibly be an oily Arab. I believe it has something to do with negroid genetics and/or inbreeding.

Honk should be able to fill you in on the genetics. If we’re lucky, FD will provide a graph.

You see? We’re all here to help raise human consciousness and understanding.

As Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century Arab historiographer and sociologist suggests, it is a remarkable fact that with few exceptions, most Muslim scholars in the intellectual sciences were Ajams ("Persians"):

Thus the founders of grammar were Sibawaih and after him, al-Farisi and Az-Zajjaj. All of them were of Persian descent… they invented rules of (Arabic) grammar … great jurists were Persians … only the Persians engaged in the task of preserving knowledge and writing systematic scholarly works. Thus the truth of the statement of the prophet becomes apparent, 'If learning were suspended in the highest parts of heaven the Persians would attain it' … The intellectual sciences were also the preserve of the Persians, left alone by the Arabs, who did not cultivate them … as was the case with all crafts … This situation continued in the cities as long as the Persians and Persian countries, Iraq, Khorasan and Transoxiana [=modern Central Asia], retained their sedentary culture. — Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, Translated by Franz Rosenthal (III, pp. 311-15, 271-4 [Arabic]; R.N. Frye. p. 91.

Would Gandalf suggest that brief magical 300 year period was the true Islam and the 1000 plus years of intellectual barrenness is the aberration?

Absolutely - and 300 years is a bit unfair. The best years consisted of 500 years at least - and even after that, many great scientific works by muslims continued such as in astronomy.

For comparison, Christiandom was an intellectual wasteland for around 1000 years

So whats going wrong recently? Any by recent I mean 500 years.

Oh, we got rid of religious dominance. The Enlightenment, the scientific revolution, the French and subsequent European revolutions. We simply decided we’d had enough, so we went our merry way.

The church didn’t like it, but as Weber said, the gates to the church will always be left open.

This is why so many are returning - from Bible Belt USA to secular Arab states, Turkey, and of course - Persia. The gates to the church - and the mosque - are still there.

The Enlightenment still needs to be defended, and this means guarding our freedoms from the reactionaries, goons and "scientific" racist propagandists. Australia is in no danger of becoming an Islamic state, but parts of our own Western tradition are starting to look like a distant dream. People are getting dumber - voluntarily. There has never been.more information and propaganda, and people have never reacted against it more. There has never been.higher literacy, but there has never been so few people reading real books. We’re in danger of revisiting the Dark Ages.

Use it or lose it, effendes. The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

People are getting dumber - voluntarily. There has never been.more information and propaganda, and people have never reacted against it more. There has never been.higher literacy, but there has never been so few people reading real books. We’re in danger of revisiting the Dark Ages.

Yes, I agree.

But I think the only way I can fight this trend is to "be the change that we wish to see in the world"

Do you think habitual disinformation on the internet would have a positive, or negative impact on the trend?

People are getting dumber - voluntarily. There has never been.more information and propaganda, and people have never reacted against it more. There has never been.higher literacy, but there has never been so few people reading real books. We’re in danger of revisiting the Dark Ages.

Yes, I agree.

But I think the only way I can fight this trend is to "be the change that we wish to see in the world"

Do you think habitual disinformation on the internet would have a positive, or negative impact on the trend?

I think habitual disinformation is a symptom - and a cause. In the US, when the financial markets crashed in 2008, people rushed to join the Tea Party, a movement funded by neocon investors, including the billionaire Koch brothers. Its aim was a distraction from financial reform (and health care reform, which this movement cut its teeth on). It distracted with issues like immigration , gay marriage and guns. It rallied the knuckleheads to look over there while the bankers, big investors and lobbyists quietly went back to business as usual.

The movement grew in its power - bigger than the bankers, big investors and lobbyists ever intended. A celebrity billionaire arose to capture them. Forget knuckleheads like Sarah Palin, we now have the disseminator of habitual disinformation par excellence - one Donald J Trump.

To date, the habitual disinformationists have not risen to power. Sure, they’ve had a few victories, scuttling or watering down most initiatives their nemesis, the first tinted president, proposed. But they have not risen to political power, not since the fall of George W Bush. Fox News is no longer the voice of Middle Amerika, and the legacy of Bush still rots away in US history, leaving an obvious stench on another knucklehead movement, neoconservatism.

But elected office is not the end-point. The purpose of the habitual disinformationists is to keep the public gaze away from the deals of its players, who own all the big global monopolies, who don’t pay tax, and who have the rules of the game quietly fixed in their favour. They even have a government who’s showed it’s prepared to bail their businesses out with taxpayer dollars, and they’re brazen enough to give hundreds of millions of those dollars to themselves in bonuses - money that is quietly stashed away in offshore tax havens, so they even avoid paying any of it back in tax.

Not wages, remember, but bonuses; gifts - their tax-funded reward for bringing down the global economy and perpetuating the biggest fraud on bondholders the world has ever seen. To date, out of all the players in the GFC, only one loan broker has been charged. He got a two year suspended sentence.

So yes, Honk, the media "elite", the feminist ballbusters, the Muslims banning Christmas and prayer in schools, the Mexican rapists, the gay mafia, the Pakistani tree-loppers, all of them are one big cover up to keep you busy frothing at the mouth and happily spreading habitual disinformation to keep the real players out of the news.

Not you, Honk, of course. I just mean people in general. You’ve changed. You’ve seen the light.

The Enlightenment still needs to be defended, and this means guarding our freedoms from the reactionaries, goons and "scientific" racist propagandists. Australia is in no danger of becoming an Islamic state, but parts of our own Western tradition are starting to look like a distant dream. People are getting dumber - voluntarily. There has never been.more information and propaganda, and people have never reacted against it more. There has never been.higher literacy, but there has never been so few people reading real books. We’re in danger of revisiting the Dark Ages.

Absolutely. And I would sum up the current state of affairs thusly:

we must defend our proud western intellectual heritage - by becoming dumber and dumber

The Enlightenment still needs to be defended, and this means guarding our freedoms from the reactionaries, goons and "scientific" racist propagandists. Australia is in no danger of becoming an Islamic state, but parts of our own Western tradition are starting to look like a distant dream. People are getting dumber - voluntarily. There has never been.more information and propaganda, and people have never reacted against it more. There has never been.higher literacy, but there has never been so few people reading real books. We’re in danger of revisiting the Dark Ages.

Absolutely. And I would sum up the current state of affairs thusly:

we must defend our proud western intellectual heritage - by becoming dumber and dumber

The Enlightenment still needs to be defended, and this means guarding our freedoms from the reactionaries, goons and "scientific" racist propagandists. Australia is in no danger of becoming an Islamic state, but parts of our own Western tradition are starting to look like a distant dream. People are getting dumber - voluntarily. There has never been.more information and propaganda, and people have never reacted against it more. There has never been.higher literacy, but there has never been so few people reading real books. We’re in danger of revisiting the Dark Ages.

Absolutely. And I would sum up the current state of affairs thusly:

we must defend our proud western intellectual heritage - by becoming dumber and dumber

Love how you're turning this around, yet the science just keeps rolling out of secular democratic countries.

meanwhile...

When the 2005 earthquake struck Pakistan, killing more than 90 000 people, no major scientist in the country publicly challenged the belief, freely propagated through the mass media, that the quake was God's punishment for sinful behavior. Mullahs ridiculed the notion that science could provide an explanation; they incited their followers into smashing television sets, which had provoked Allah's anger and hence the earthquake

The "islamic" golden age is once again, not quite accurate. More specifically, it was a Persian golden age. Almost all great "islamic" scholars were persians, who were absorbed into islam rather than produced by it.

Others have made the argument that it was in fact principally led by Syrian christians and/or jews - to which I make the same response. Even if it were true (which its not), then you have to acknowledge that this Persian golden age didn't begin until Islam came along. So why couldn't these great Persians create this unprecedented scientific flowering when they were free and unoccupied? You simply can't get past the fact that Islam not only allowed, but actively enabled such a scientific surge. You really don't want to get into the contortions FD has to get into to argue the opposite. Its not pretty I can assure you.

Would you describe the absence of historically significant social, economic and scientific advances as a "contortion"?